The Chronicler of Aincrad
by mozzery
Summary: He isn't a front liner, his skills as a smith are non-existent, and he has no guild connections at all despite being in the game for months. See how a near death experience gives one middling player purpose and meaning in a virtual world, and inspires him to take up a cause for those who have fallen.
1. Prologue

In one timeline an unassuming 22 year old man finished observing a group fighting skeleton type monsters on the 24th floor. He notes how much damage the monsters do to them, notes his own strength, and only then decides to fight one. He goes in supremely confident that while a skeleton might take him low, mathematically his victory was assured as long as he just attacks with his slash sword skill over and over again. He goes in without the knowledge that the skeleton when brought low possesses the ability to critically strike and it kills him, making him one of the 3843 unfortunate souls to die in Sword Art Online in that timeline. In this timeline, the critical strike leaves him at 1 HP and instills in him a motivation; a motivation to be a speaker for those who had died and would die in this brutal game. A motivation that leads to him becoming known as the Chronicler of Aincrad. This is his story.

After two years, two thousand four hundred interviews conducted personally, and over eighteen hundred names finished I had eventually, against my will, began to see my effort as a vaguely necessary routine and not the noble and life affirming work that I originally envisioned it as. As much help as I have received in terms of financial support and connections with the front liners from the entirety of the Knights of Blood organization and especially their leader Heathcliff it still felt as if so much was solely on my shoulders. The grind of talking to people about those around them whom they have lost with absolutely no prior training for it has left me a shell of my former self, persevering only due to my believe that I am the only one both capable and willing to finish the task I set for myself. The task to account for each death in game and use my near eidetic memory to tell each fallen players story once the front lines save us from this accursed game. I am one of 6,190 people remaining from the approximately 10,000 to log in to Sword Art online. My title is the Chronicler.


	2. Recognizing the scope

_Seven months into Aincrad- one day after the skeleton encounter_

I woke up and rose my hands above my head, mentally checking in for the day. As always, I opened my menu, checked my gold and gear, and then checked my inventory as if something would randomly pop up in it that wasn't there the day before-like my inventory was my refrigerator from back home.

I walked out of the inn and went to fight some monsters to earn the gold I needed to maintain my current lifestyle. I might've had a revelation and found purpose yesterday, but that didn't mean that every aspect of my being changed instantly. True, the monsters I fought were a couple levels below the ones I fought yesterday, and maybe the house money fund would get ignored due to the time I expected to be traveling and forced to stay at inns, but I told myself it wouldn't be that different from normal.

It doesn't matter that I've never interviewed anyone before or that I don't really know that many people; I had a plan and was going to stick to it. The first step was incredibly simple, go down to the Monument of Life on the first floor and copy down the names of the deceased along with the time and cause of death. Simple, right?

Simple, but not easy. There were 10,000 names on the thing to go through, and over 2,200 names already crossed off. I morbidly thought that at least my job would be made easier by the hundreds whose death was listed as "unplugged from nerve gear". The family and friends who had unplugged the nerve gear must be grieving and guilt-stricken enough without me having their cause of death publicized again after we make it out. Even so, I wrote down the names anyway, just in case.

I put the ones listed as "suicide" in their own separate section. I know that many of these were very early player deaths that believed that suicide would make them leave the game and awaken in the real world. Seven months later, we are still in here, so it is exceedingly likely that these people were wrong.

The unplugged and the suicides were the ones who made me despise Kayaba. People were dead simply because they underestimated just how far Kayaba was willing to go to make his dream a reality. They are the ones truly most worthy of our grief and tears. Yet, in my heart, I know they are the ones that my work will champion the least.

This thought gave me pause until I reminded myself that the public outside of the game probably thinks of all the dead like the unplugged right now, and that just because someone died in SAO, it didn't mean that they didn't _live_ in SAO as well.

I pressed on, and finished writing down every name. It's admittedly embarrassing, but it wasn't until I finished that last name that I suddenly realized the true enormity of the task I decided to undertake. Namely that I needed to personally interview people connected to as many of these people as possible, and that since no one else had started to do so, the only option I currently could think of would be going up to people and asking them to talk about their friends who died...

Also I'd need to get around 5 interviews concerning a person a day for a year just to catch up to the death total right now, and that's if each person only got one person to speak for them, and I want more than that. I want their stories to be told.

Yeah, I need a better plan.


End file.
